Helping America Navigate a New Energy Reality

Modern man, the kind with the 1400 cc brain, is said to have been around for about 200,000 years. For the first 190,000 years however, not much of note happened, or at least that we know about. Tools got better – sharper spears and axes – but in general our remote ancestors went through life hunting and gathering. Little seems to have happened, for early man was completely occupied in feeding himself and, of course, procreation. Researchers think that in all these years the world’s population never got to more than 15 million.

The first great change the Neolithic Revolution happened circa 10,000 to 7,000 years ago when our remote ancestors discovered how to domesticate plants and animals. This was great for instead of chasing around in the woods all day trying to spear or find something to eat, a person could sit at home and produce all the food he needed not only for himself and his family, but several others as well. These others could then group themselves in villages, towns, or cities and start developing specialized skills – tailor, shoemaker, brain surgeon, stock broker. All these wonderful new skills could develop because a farmer could produce and transport enough stored energy in the form of grain, veggies, fruits and animals, to allow civilizations to form. These civilizations did all sorts of things; they educated a least some of their young, discovered writing, science, the arts, and made war on each other — all because there was enough energy stored in harvested food, wood, and later metals so that not everybody needed to search for food all day.

History bubbled along for about 10,000 years until the second great transition commonly called the Industrial Revolution started about 200 years back. Although this revolution started with better iron-making and waterwheel-powered textile factories, it really took off with the exploitation of fossil fuels (coal) and the invention of the steam engine. Someday the historians might get around to renaming the epoch, “the fossil fuel revolution” for it was this new source of energy that allowed it to happen. After the steam engine allowed us to pump out coal mines, there was no holding mankind back — trains, factories, steamships, electricity, automobiles, airplanes, and electronics were all developed in short order. Lost in all the excitement, however, was the simple fact that all these wonders and a whole new way of life for many was all wrought by massive amounts of very cheap energy that could be extracted from the ground in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas.

For many, thoughts of getting enough to eat faded into the mists as a farmer or two equipped with science, mechanization, transportation and fertilizer could feed hundreds of others, living thousands of miles away, at ridiculously low cost. From an historical perspective, however, the major result of the fossil fuel-powered industrial revolution was the astonishing growth of the world’ s population – from circa 1 billion people in 1800 to seven billion this coming August. That this growth could occur can be attributed to the massive increase in food production and transportation that fossil fuels and derivative fertilizers allowed, and to the nearly universal dissemination of modern medicine that cut infant mortality and increased life spans.

Needless to say, seven billion people can and do use up a lot more resources — fossil fuels, minerals, water, fresh air, food, etc. than do one billion and that is the problem we are just starting to face. Scarcities have already started to develop for some fossil fuels, food, and some minerals. These scarcities will become worse over the next few decades until mankind eventually is forced into radically different lifestyles and forms of employment. Energy shortages are already developing (e.g. $100 oil) and are virtually certain to curtail the use of many kinds of oil-powered transportation over the next 20 years.

With declining quantities of fossil fuels, and the likelihood that renewable forms of energy cannot be developed and expanded quickly enough, continued worldwide economic growth is unlikely. While countries that are self-sufficient in fossil fuels and those able to get a lock on a share of fossil fuel production (most likely the Chinese) will be able to grow for a while. Eventually, however, they are certain to encounter other constraints. At the minute fresh water and food seem poised to follow fossil fuels into scarcity, but there are many other natural resources that soon will be too expensive for common use.

Taken together, the decline and eventual near cessation of fossil fuel production and that of many other minerals, disruption in global weather patterns, and the growing food and water scarcity will constitute the third great transition. Unlike the previous transitions in which life arguably got better for some, if not most, of the world’s peoples, any upside to this transition seems to pale in the face of what is to come. Obviously the seven billion of us are going to have to shrink to some more sustainable number. Some demographers are already arguing that this might be under 1 billion. It would be nice if we could all do a China and limit each female to one child for a few generations, but this seems unlikely to happen soon. In reality, the transition to a sustainable world population is likely to be much less pleasant.

What life will be like as we move further into mankind’s third great transition is difficult to predict. In addition to six billion more people, however, the 200-year old industrial age has brought much new human knowledge and many new technologies that should be of use in mitigating the problems and hardships ahead. Although liquid-powered motorized vehicles are likely to have a very short half-life, there are other technologies that could pick up at least part of the slack as soon as we realize we have a problem and economics dictates change.

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Gentlemen,
Pick up a copyof September 1974, Scientific American and read it. What you cite was known then and most likely for some significant time prior to that. The answer to the looming catastrophe is to delay the onset of fertility in females for about 20 years, especially in the third world where birth rates are off scale. This kills nobody, ends most religeous wars and backs up resource usage from tipping points in just a few years. Normal mortality takes care of the other end of the “too many of us” problem. Who do we see about that?

http://frances.dath@gmail.com Frances

” … a person could sit at home and produce all the food he needed not only for himself and his family … ”

Well done! Single-handedly eliminating half of civilisation. Of course, women were only ever good for having babies, no?

Be a Friend !

[Advocating for U.S. oil exports] “It is time to build policies that reflect our newfound [oil] abundance, that view the future with optimism, that recognize the power of free markets to drive innovation, and that proceed with the conviction that free trade brings prosperity and progress.” – Rex Tillerson, CEO ExxonMobil ... Read More

March 9, 2015

“Is there a black swan that we don’t know about which will come by 2050 and we will have no demand [for oil]?” — Saudi Arabia oil minister Ali al-Naimi ... Read More

March 2, 2015

“The fiscal position of Venezuela will suffer the most from the decline in world oil prices, as its public sector derives a large share of its fiscal revenues from oil exports. In addition, the domestic price of gasoline is expected to remain close to zero, which virtually eliminates any potential revenues from domestic sales.” — […] ... Read More

February 23, 2015

[Following up on last week’s Quote”] “Goldman Sachs doesn’t seem to be cluing in to the notion of field decline, which is relentless, and what x wells per y unit of time means to field production. Also their chart of vintaged decline curves as proof that well productivity is going up is highly misleading, as […] ... Read More

February 23, 2015

“Maybe a month ago was the first time that I ever saw the price really move after the headlines [from Baker Hughes Inc.] on the rig counts hit the wire. You’ve got bond traders driving electric vehicles who wouldn’t recognize an oil well if it were in their back yard, and now even they know […] ... Read More

February 16, 2015

“The decline in the U.S. rig count likely remains well short of the level required to slow U.S. shale oilproduction to levels consistent with a balanced global market. Lower oil prices will be required over the coming quarters to see the U.S. production growth slowdown materialize.” – Goldman Sachs, from a note on Tuesday, in […] ... Read More

February 9, 2015

“The U.S. growth story has been central to the oil market story. In a few months, that month-to-month growth is going to flatten out.” IHS predicts the “sensational” growth will level off at 9.5 million barrels per day in the second quarter of 2015, assuming the benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) prices remain below US$60… […] ... Read More

February 2, 2015

“The problem is that the US shale sector in aggregate is still not free cash-flow positive even after five years of soaring production, and if the shale model was not able to show positive free cash-flow even when prices were averaging around $100/bbl from 2011 until mid-2014, then investors and lenders will clearly be very […] ... Read More

January 26, 2015

“We spent a lot of money to go out and drill and use new technologies just to stop production from depleting in our mature fields. It took us a lot of capital to basically run in place and now we’re looking at crude prices under $40 a barrel.” — Rock Zierman, CEO of California Independent […] ... Read More

January 19, 2015

“You can never have an agreement whereby everybody cuts production. We can’t trust all OPEC countries. And we can’t trust the non-OPEC countries. So it’s not on the table because the others will cheat. The past has proven that. When Saudi Arabia cut production in the ’80s and ’90s, everybody cheated and took market share […] ... Read More

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